


Opposite of Amnesia

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hockey, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 19:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19257556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: Tatsuya dreamed of having a beach house when he was a kid.





	Opposite of Amnesia

**Author's Note:**

> centuries-verse, takes place about the same time as [frozen proof](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14727621)/[about to bloom](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11961351)

The jet lag catches up with Tatsuya when he’s sitting in the passenger seat of Daiki’s car, heading down the freeway after practice. The arguments he’d made early in the morning after getting up at five and making coffee, drinking it on the porch until Daiki had stumbled out of bed to join him and fall back asleep against him, a welcome warm weight, are running through his mind again. He should have driven; he’d wanted to trace the familiar route in his own car that’s been gathering dust in the garage all season the way he hasn’t in a few years, one of the many items on the running list of things he needs to do now that he’s home. Daiki had laughed at him, and now that he’s leaning his head against the window maybe he’d been right to, but Tatsuya’s not going to admit it out loud. 

Last night’s game he’d been running on adrenaline, like some kind of dream sequence, a video game, a memory preserved like chocolate in the back of the freezer suddenly brought out again, Daiki sending perfect passes his way, receiving his to drive to the net, hits coming crisp, the roar of the home crowd. The uniforms are different; the sponsors on the boards are unfamiliar; the rookies are veterans and half the team is made of people Tatsuya’s never played with. It’s glaringly new, but familiar, the opposite of amnesia. It’s a dusty set of hockey gloves in the back of his closet that he can slip onto his hands again; it’s home.

Daiki shakes him awake when they get back to their house, the car ride keeping Tatsuya from falling too deeply asleep. The sound and smell of the Pacific outside the bedroom window has the reverse effect, a lullaby of sensation that having Daiki lying beside him completes. They’d said they’d hit up a bar or something tonight, but Tatsuya now knows they won’t. He could sleep in all the way through tomorrow’s practice, though he trusts Daiki--as his captain, if nothing else--to wake him for that.

Words to that effect somehow fall from his mouth, though Daiki only half-follows, murmuring for clarification that Tatsuya’s too gone to give.

* * *

Tatsuya dreamed of having a beach house when he was a kid, occasionally. It was in between dreams of kissing the cup and taking a victory lap, scoring on the perennial Vezina candidates of his childhood, and making tic-tac-toe passes as Taiga’s center. But he’d gotten to the NHL, no cups and no childhood idols and no Taiga on his team, and needed somewhere to live other than the apartment he’d rented in the same building as a bunch of the other rookies, so he’d bought a fucking beach house.

He’s got a rental back in Boston, Revere Beach, actually an apartment, but everything about that is subpar (and he’s not looking forward to going back and cleaning the damn place out at the end of the season). He doesn’t want to think about fucking Boston right now, though; there are much more important things, like the beach house that’s his home for more than a few months of the year again, Daiki, next to him on the ice again, and next to him here. He’s thrown the covers onto Tatsuya’s side of the bed, and in the glow of the alarm clock Tatsuya can trace the scars from stitches on his wrist visually, like lines in fresh ice from sharpened skates.

* * *

Tatsuya’s always enjoyed watching Daiki with the rookies and the younger guys, the easy way he shares his technique and advice, how shy some of them are around him and how his natural warmth brings them out, melting the barriers between them in seconds. Even when he was captain, it had been difficult for Tatsuya sometimes to bridge the gaps with all of them, to find the right words to say. (Given the way Daiki has complained to Tatsuya on the phone, hounding him for help, Tatsuya knows it hasn’t been as natural or easy as going out on the ice and scoring a goal, but he’s still more at ease with it.)

There’s a little jealousy there; there’s no point in lying to himself about it. This is not his team; he has no reason to be captain here and now--despite how unfair it had seemed to have all of that ripped away from him. But the jealousy is a small slice, a fingernail-wide sliver of an ice shaving turned up by a skate. Mixed into the cocktail of pride and certain other feelings it adds a not-unpleasant bitterness that’s easily lost when Tatsuya tips the glass down his throat. Daiki, his Daiki--is it right to think this possessively?--is so magnetic, pulling the kids up with him like iron filings on his poles.

Daiki turns around, glancing back at Tatsuya. “What?”

“Nothing,” says Tatsuya.

Their stick taps are the same, and so are their superstitions. So is the soft kiss they share after practice, pulled over into a McDonald’s parking lot, before Tatsuya gets out to get them coffee. When he comes back, Daiki’s wearing a look that says he’s still thinking about the kiss, slow and sloppy like a million and a half other kisses they’ve shared before now.

It gets Tatsuya, somewhere, that he can still get Daiki like this, proverbs about absence and distance and memory be damned. It’s not the same as how much younger they were once, five more miles per hour on the speedometer, fingers that moved easier, fewer scars but just as many bruises to work around. Parts of him will always be stuck in the past, mired in deep where they’d dug their feet and poured concrete over the top, regrets and wants and places he’ll never get to go again. But enough of him is here in the present, no less stuck, no closer to forgetting, but here in the moment, fingers fumbling with the buttons on Daiki’s shirt, tongue on teeth, pressing Daiki down to the mattress, the slats on the bed groaning like they’d forgotten the weight of the two of them.


End file.
